A Tale of Money.

Once there was a city divided into two classes: the slaves and the masters.

The slaves were whipped regularly by the masters, whose only distinction was that they owned and were permitted to own whips.

One day one of the masters said to his friend, “I do not understand. I tire of whipping the slaves. Besides, I my self am whipped regularly by other masters. How am *I* not a slave?”

And at the last of these words his friend rebelled: “You Fool! Don’t you see?? It is in the life of a master to whip other masters! All life is whipping, to whip and to be whipped, except for those who own no whips, for whom it is only to be whipped! Be grate-full that you are not one of THOSE.”

“But what if,” protested the young man. “I ventured beyond the city walls and found a city where-in no whips exist.

And at this point the friend, whose vein popped in his fore-head at the word “walls”, drew his whip and rained a blow upon the young man’s face.

“You see?” he asked the man who now bled as he did. “That is ALL that you shall find beyond these walls. Now back to work.”

But the young man did not return to work. Instead he said to his friend: “Now that you have whipped me, I have no choice but to leave. For here I KNOW that I shall be whipped by your likes. At least if I aspire to find a city that is less violent I may be whipped by the kind of whom I have not yet tired.”

And so, moving swiftly so as to dodge another blow from his companion, who was too fatigued to try again or to pursue him, the young man departed the village.

The young man traveled for a long time. He saw many villages and cities that were similarly built upon the same hierarchy. They wove different flags, played different songs, and built buildings along disparate styles, but without fail they all had slaves and masters.

Until one day the young man found one that did not. He heard of a series of islands in the distance into which people disappeared, never returning from their voyages. So the young man borrowed a vessel from a sailor who had disavowed the sea in fear and sorrow for his lost friends.

The young man found an Island where there were no whips. The occupants of this isle had never left since first arriving.

Here the young man found a wife and raised a child. In the man’s older years, his son sailed back to the Main Land and found his father’s village.

He found the man who had whipped his father long ago, now too an old man, and much more fatigued than even before. And he said unto the man:

“You who have whipped my father. Since you have done that none of my kin shall live again in this village. And neither shall any of yours, for in mere moments a legion that I have assembled shall ransack the village and tear down its walls.”

And the man replied: “My young boy! Your father never heard the apology that has grown in my heart like briar for years! Years ago the suspicion dawned upon me that I had been FOOLED. I had grown up a slave and thought that through POWER I might escape the whip of the Masters. Yet the TRUE Masters were never their selves whipped, or they had learnt how to escape the whip entirely. I had become merely a whip for THEM to use against my own people, who were still enslaved! And I too was still enslaved, though now I am whipped not only by my peers but by my own conscience.”

And the son of the rebel replied: “It is too late for your stories! I hear the horns of the cavalry in the distance!”

And the city was ransacked.

The old man, as the young boy fled, said to his self: “All my life I clung to the walls of the city that oppressed me. I feared what lay beyond them as much as I feared the whip that had hurt me. That whip taught me to fear all. So I ascribed to the bearing of a whip the name of Freedom, I ascribed to Freedom from the City’s oppression the sting of the whip, and even in admitting, for I never knew what lay beyond the city walls, that all my fears were born in the city, I espoused this terror and even tried to lord the walls of this city over my closest and dearest friends. Now that those walls are torn asunder and down, I too am torn asunder and down.”

And the old man whipped him self to death.

Dm.A.A.